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Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Once again, the most powerful and almighty force in a global
battle for dominance and superiority has fallen.Once again, a seemingly invincible
force has died, attempting to claim victory on the Russian plain:

Holders Germany were knocked out of
the World Cup on a stunning afternoon in Group F, courtesy of a 2-0 defeat
against South Korea.

Russia: the place where empires go to die.Long ago it was Napoleon.Then it was Hitler.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

There is some real confusion about the origins and meaning
of the phrase Cultural Marxism.The confusion
begins by attributing cultural characteristics to Marxian theory.Marx developed a theory based on production,
not really so much on culture.The
proper place to look is Antonio Gramsci, an anti-Marxist communist if you will –
Gramsci’s theory was specifically and overtly aimed at culture.

Gramsci understood that the working class in the west would
not declare war on their middle class neighbors as long as they shared
Christian values.It was these values
that he believed must be destroyed if communism was to be realized.Therefore, the proper term would be Cultural
Gramsci-ism.

What is the definition and objective of Cultural Marxism (to
use the common phrase)?Destroy
Christianity, Christian ethics, and Christian values.Here is at least some idea of understating
the definition:

While firmly committed to global
Communism, [Gramsci] knew that that violence would fail to win the West.
American workers (proletariat) would never declare war on their middle class
neighbors as long as they shared common Christian values. So the Italian
communist -- a contemporary of Lenin -- wrote an alternative plan for a silent
revolution. The main weapons would be deception, manipulation and infiltration.
Hiding their Marxist ideology, the new Communist warriors would seek positions
of influence in seminaries, government, communities, and the media.

Gramsci himself rejected
Christianity and all its transcendent claims. Nevertheless, he knew Christian
culture existed.... For that was the force binding all the classes... into a
single, homogeneous culture. It was a specifically Christian culture, in which
individual men and women understood that the most important things about human
life transcended the material conditions in which they lived out their mortal
lives.

How will this play out?It should be obvious in everything that underlies the polarized views of
red vs. blue counties in the United States, of the elite coasts vs. flyover
country.Where this leads?I doubt it leads to rapprochement any time
soon.Ideally it leads to peaceful decentralization
and secession.

However, some see civil war in the
future.Others see that the “red” voters
will vote
in a strongman that makes Trump look like Mother Theresa if they don’t get
what they want with Trump; the objective being “we will teach those SOBs a lesson
and bring them to heel.”

While libertarians (contrary to Marxists) embrace property
rights, the battle is no longer here; the battle for liberty vs. communism is being
fought in the battle for the traditional western culture, grounded in
Christianity and Christian ethics.Gramsci outlined this.

Hence, libertarians that embrace slogans like “anything
peaceful” play right into Gramsci.While
they have their eyes on “property,” they are ignorant of the war being fought
right in front of their noses.Such
libertarians contribute to losing both the battle and the war.My bet is “anything peaceful” equals “Gramsci
wins.”

And my bet is that those who want your property and your
life understand this – and understand it much better than libertarians who don’t.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Please note: I will only cover the introduction and
conclusion of this piece, before adding some closing thoughts.FVD’s work is rather detailed and thorough,
and try as I might I cannot find a reasonable way to summarize it and do it
justice at the same time.

Introduction

Classical liberalism arose at a
time when Christian orthodoxy was still vibrant.

It will be good to understand specifically what FVD means
when he uses these terms:

By “classical liberalism,” I mean
the liberalism of those who postulate a necessary link between liberty and
objective law and justice, i.e., respect for natural persons, their property,
and contractual obligations.

By “Christian orthodoxy,” I mean
the interpretation of the Bible that became authoritative within the main
churches as a result of the efforts of Saint Augustine and other early church
fathers.However, I shall consider only
its moral ontology. Moreover, I shall
discount Augustine’s doctrine of hereditary sin.

So, returning to the opening line: FVD is making clear his
view that classical liberalism and Christian orthodoxy were connected – the
former was born while the latter still held sway.You might say it is coincidence; you might
say that classical liberalism could have sprung forth (or still could spring
forth) anywhere – in the environment of any other religion or no religion or
multiple religions.

You might say this, but there is no evidence for this.So…after several thousand years of recorded
history, perhaps we might take the evidence of this as reasonably meaningful;
perhaps we can consider the connection as mandatory and even the order as
relevant.

How does FVD make the connection?

Liberalism and Christian orthodoxy,
sharing a number of fundamental ideas about the nature of man and of
interpersonal relations, presuppose the same moral ontology of natural
law.The high tide of Christian
orthodoxy and classical liberalism belongs to the era when natural law was the
fundamental concept of all serious thought about the human world.

Unless someone in the audience has evidence that such “fundamental
ideas about the nature of man and of interpersonal relations” are also shared
with other religious philosophies – and given the thousands of years of
evidence from which you have to find such examples – perhaps we can dispense
with the idea that classical liberalism (or its offspring, libertarianism) can
be had by all, is equally valid for all, etc.

As an aside (and as I recently commented at the blog), I
explored once the Japanese medieval tradition, to see if something approaching
the relatively libertarian law of medieval Europe could be found. On the
surface, the two societies have much in common. Yet, there was nothing in Japan
that one might describe as being the roots of the NAP or natural law. Guess
what was missing?

There is no sense of the worth of
the individual, no sense of decentralized law – just decentralized power ([and
only] toward the latter part of the period in question). There is no concept of
natural law, of man made in God’s image, of oath, of law following the oldest
custom and tradition, of religion as a check on political power.

Monday, June 18, 2018

What happened to the promise of classical liberalism,
passing from its birth through its golden age and to its dramatic and violent
death in little more than one century?Exploring the topics of culture, tradition, and liberty inherently
involves an exploration of this question.

It is impossible to understand the
massive concentrations of political power in the twentieth century, appearing
so paradoxically, as it has seemed, right after a century and a half of individualism
in economics and morals, unless we see clearly the close relationship that
prevailed all through the nineteenth century between individualism and State
power and between both of these together and the general weakening of the area
of association that lies intermediate to man and the State.

It was the flowering of individualism – an outcome of
Enlightenment thought – that made possible the power of the State.

It is worth noting that some see a difference in classical
liberalism as it developed in Britain as opposed to its development in
France.Friedrich Hayek was one of these;
another was Francis Lieber:

In 1848, Francis Lieber
distinguished between what he called "Anglican and Gallican Liberty".
Lieber asserted that "independence in the highest degree, compatible with
safety and broad national guarantees of liberty, is the great aim of Anglican
liberty, and self-reliance is the chief source from which it draws its
strength". On the other hand, Gallican liberty "is sought in
government...the French look for the highest degree of political civilization
in organizational, that is, in the highest degree of interference by public
power".

While the differences must be appreciated, it seems to me
that Nisbet is working through the commonalities.From the Anglican: “independence in the
highest degree,” “broad national guarantees of liberty.” From the Gallican: “highest
degree of interference by public power.”

This was a two-fold emancipation:

[First, emancipation] of the
individual from his traditional associative chains; and, second, of the State
itself from the mass of feudal customs, which, everywhere, limited its real
efficacy.

Atomized independence both necessitating a powerful State
and guaranteed by the State; it is common to both threads and it is the
argument presented by Nisbet.It should
be no wonder, it seems, why classical liberalism ushered in the most
comprehensive State apparatus, quickly moving from the relative peace of the
nineteenth century to the bloodiest wars and political philosophies of the
twentieth century.

This affinity between social
individualism and political power is, I believe, the most fateful fact of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Political power was camouflaged with the rhetoric of liberty
and invested with the essence of religious community.Salvation by State, with all the necessary
power and authority to deliver:

Rousseau had written that it is the
force of the State that achieves the liberty of its members….the liberty of the
individual became the prime justification for the powerful legislative attacks
upon old values, old idea systems, and old associations.

We can rail all we like about the fact that this isn’t what we wanted; this wasn’t the philosophy behind true
classical liberalism, we can do better next time, whatever.Revolutionaries rarely get to direct the ends
of the revolution.We can learn what
must be rebuilt by paying attention to what was torn down:

Hence the early destruction of the
guilds.Hence the prohibition of all new
forms of economic association….Charitable societies were declared illegal….
Literary, cultural, and educational societies were also banned…. We observe
also the profound changes made in the structure and functions of the
family.In this way, too, was the Church
dealt with.Profession, class, the
historic commune, the universities, and provinces, all alike came under the
atomizing consideration of the legislators of the Revolution.

In France this was done via the guillotine.Elsewhere in the West, it came more
gradually.But the root cause, the
underlying philosophy, was the same.

What follows is a comment on some
of the arguments on intellectual property and blackmail presented respectively
by N. Stephan Kinsella and Walter Block….

I understand fairly well the arguments of Kinsella and Block
on these topics, but this is in any case secondary to FVD’s purpose:

After all, etching in the fine
points of libertarian jurisprudence on blackmail or intellectual property is
hardly a pressing need.

So why is FVD writing this paper
and why am I writing about what FVD is writing about?

Rather, I believe
my disagreement on those small matters critically involves the very basis on which
Block and Kinsella chose to erect their legal arguments. I am referring to
their use of the so-called Rothbardian non-aggression rule as the foundation or
axiom for libertarian jurisprudence.

Heresy is the
dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of
a novel denial of some essential part therein.

The question we will explore: which
party is doing “the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by
the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein”?

You can surmise from the following
the view of FVD on this question:

The purpose of my
comments is to explain why I think that this axiom is inadequate from a
libertarian point of view…. I shall endeavour to show briefly where the so-called
non-aggression axiom fits in a libertarian philosophy of law.

FVD describes many of the same
struggles I have with considering the most restrictive definition of the
non-aggression principle (and you will forgive my shortcut): it considers only
life and property; contracts are valid only when they involve title transfer;
physical property is the only type of property; relationships are defined only via
what is explicitly considered in a contract.

I will let FVD explain it:

I shall argue that,
if pressed to their logical conclusion, [Kinsella’s arguments against the
legitimacy of trademark protection] would make the very idea of a contractual
order and therefore of a free market incoherent.

It is my
contention that [Block’s arguments concerning libel and labour contracts] lead
to results that are incompatible with the requirements of freedom and justice
that define the libertarian perspective on human relations…. It seems to legitimize
only a world in which every possible contingency must be covered by an explicit
contractual stipulation.

The whole of FVD’s argument can be
summarized as follows:

My differences
with Kinsella and Block stem from the fact that it does not follow from those
theses that defensive use of force is justified or lawful only in response to aggressive
violent invasions of persons or property.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Contrary to popular belief in our circles, the reality of
political sovereignty in a monopoly State was not always with us.It certainly did not exist in the European
Middle Ages; such sovereignty was certainly not invested in the kings of the
time.

Whether coincidence or causation (you know my view), the
road to sovereignty aligns with the period beginning with the Reformation and
Renaissance and reaches maturity with Enlightenment thinking.In this chapter, Nisbet examines three of the
important political theorists during this period of transition from
decentralized governance to political sovereignty; I will complement Nisbet’s
work with relevant excerpts from Jacques Barzun’s magnum opus, From
Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life.

The three characters are Jean Bodin, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques
Rousseau.Each one successively advanced
the cause of the destruction of intermediate authorities and advanced the cause
of centralization under the sovereign.

Bodin ascribes unconditional power to the sovereign, yet
sovereignty remains weak as it is associated strictly with the monarch; Hobbes
moves sovereignty from the monarch to the legal State, all customs and
traditions having legitimacy only due to the State; Rousseau tears down the
intermediate institutions completely, and identifies sovereignty in the will of
the people – the General Will.

Jean Bodin

Jean Bodin (1530–1596) was
a French jurist and political philosopher, member of the Parlement of Paris and
professor of law in Toulouse. He is best known for his theory of sovereignty;
he was also an influential writer on demonology.

From Nisbet:

Of Bodin it has been well said that
he had ceased to be medieval without becoming modern.

Bodin was one of the Politiques,
a group of men who were dedicated to action in behalf of the central power at
the expense of all other social and moral authorities.This was during the time of the Wars of
Religion, it an outgrowth of the Reformation (and it an outgrowth of complaints,
both legitimate and otherwise, against the Church).

“Majesty or sovereignty,” he
declares, “is the most high, absolute and perpetual power over the subjects and
citizens in a Commonweale.”

His power was to be inalienable and imprescriptible; it
could not be limited by custom; the king was no longer below the law, but above
the law; the edict of the sovereign was the law of the land.

From Barzun:

For France, Bodin is sure that a
division of powers, a so-called mixed government, will not work…. The only
check on monarchy that Bodin would retain was the Estates General, the
irregularly summoned assembly that voted new taxes… The Estates represented the
three orders – clergy, nobles, and commoners….

Bodin could not completely divorce himself from the
traditional past.He made a sharp
distinction between State and society; he held a devotion to the moral and
social qualities of intermediate associations.He does not believe a commonwealth could exist without such intermediate
associations.He finds the highest place
for family, thus demonstrating his connection to the medieval past.

Bodin will not tolerate the thought
that the political sovereign should be supreme over the individual members of
the family and over its customs and property.

It was via property that Bodin would make his stand:

If the State were given the power
to alienate property, through interference with customs of inheritance, there
would be no limit to the State’s capacity for the enslavement of man.

The man’s home was his castle – even extending to the
father’s right over life and death of the family members.How this castle was to be defended when man
was left nowhere to appeal other than the sovereign is not clear.

Yes, there were logical confusions in Bodin’s thought. Keeping
in mind that he was writing in a time of religious wars in France and under the
effects of the breakdown in Church authority, this is, perhaps, understandable.

Monday, June 11, 2018

I have never looked into the concept of propertarianism before.To the extent I had heard the term in the
past, I considered it a critic’s way to refer to libertarianism – you know: “those
libertarians, all they care about in law is their property.”

Now it is time to correct this misconception.

First, some background.The website from which the current essay is taken has on its masthead
the following: Propertarianism: The Philosophy of Western Civilization in Scientific
Terms.From the “About” page (all
emphasis in original):

The central idea is the completion of the scientific method,
and its application to the entire spectrum
of human knowledge.

The rest of the work consists of
application of that scientific method to the scope of human knowledge: “Here is the completed scientific method. If
we apply the completed scientific method to the full scope of human knowledge,
organized by combining categories of philosophy and social science into a
single hierarchy, the result is *all of these ideas*.”

The consequence of completing such
a reformation of the scope of human knowledge, is our ability to explain not
only all of human behavior, but to compare all human civilizations and explain
why each excelled (The West), developed (China), fell into stasis (India), or
regressed (Islam, Australian aboriginals, and possibly central africans), were
conquered (far too many), or Collapsed (Mesoamericans).

Not a small task, and I do not intend to follow the path
this far.Instead, I will focus on a
very small subset taken from the “Core Concepts” essay.I will not examine the entire essay; I find
only portions of it relevant to the discussion here and to my interests.However, for completeness, I offer short
excerpts from the introductory portions of the essay:

What is Propertarianism? Propertarianism
is a scientific, rational, empirical, approach to understanding and analyzing
human behavior, incentives, norms, institutions, cooperation and conflict
originated by Curt Doolittle and developed by him in cooperation with others.

What is Science? Science, or
the “scientific method” is an empirical method for gaining understanding of
reality and access to truth.

Testimonialism: Testimonialism is limiting your speech and
communication to testimony of that which is your personal, first-hand,
knowledge; free of assumption, bias, error, misunderstanding, leaps to
conclusions, etc.

Operationalism: Operationalism means speaking in operations or
actions, like a recipe or a computer program.

Propertarianism Grew Out of Libertarianism: Curt Doolittle and many
of his students are former libertarians or students of the libertarian project,
which is itself descended from and something of a reboot of enlightenment
classical liberalism.

I will not examine what are described in the essay as the errors
of libertarianism, only to offer:

To correct these errors,
Propertarianism seeks to reconcile what is salvageable from the libertarian
project…

With this, we can begin:

What Makes Propertarianism Propertarian?One of the central insights of
propertarianism is that all rights are property rights…

So far, no conflict with libertarianism.The issue lies in the definition of
property.Whereas libertarians limit
property to the physical – to include the body – propertarianism goes farther:

What is Property?Property
is that which individuals and groups demonstrate a willingness and ability to
defend.

Whether libertarians agree with this definition as pure “libertarianism,”
one cannot escape that the issue must be dealt with in the real world; people
will defend much more than physical property, no matter how elegantly pure the
theorist.

So property could be physical,
private, property, or it could be the market value of the same. It could be
physical, common, property, like a park. It could be common, intangible,
property: like public order and decency, the integrity of our language or
culture, truth in the “marketplace of ideas,” the ancestral gene pool, or
something else. It could be private but intangible: reputation, intellectual
property, honor, etc.

I take exception to some of this, but will come to this
later.The problem, as advocates of
propertarianism see it, is as follows:

Monday, June 4, 2018

As you know, I am generally favorable to the work of Jordan
Peterson.As this became a significant
issue for some readers, coincidentally a then-recent video offered me the
opportunity to take issue with a few of Peterson’s comments / views.Out of the subsequent discussion, I was
offered a video by Paul VanderKlay: Did God exist before people? Jordan Peterson, Matt Dillahunty, Don
Hoffman.This sent me on a long and
complex journey, but one very worthwhile (assuming I actually understood any of
it).

First, to introduce some of the characters (you already know
Peterson).

Paul VanderKlay (PVK): “I’m the
pastor of Living Stones Christian Reformed Church in Sacramento California.”

He has reached some level of prominence via a series of
videos discussing Peterson’s work.

In 2011, he married The Atheist Experience colleague and
co-host of the Godless Bitches
podcast Beth Presswood. Dillahunty describes himself as a feminist.

Well, Godless
feminist (is it “feminist” to refer to women as “bitches”?).Anyway, you get the idea.

I offer the longest introduction to Hoffman, as it is his
work that is of import to this discussion:

Don Hoffman is an
American quantitative psychologist and popular science author. He is a
Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of
California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy,
the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer
Science.

Hoffman has a Ph. D. from MIT, which may not be everything,
but it isn’t nothing.

Introduction

In the video, PVK is examining a discussion between
Peterson and Dillahunty (I also watched this video; as PVK points out, the
two are speaking different languages as you might have already surmised).To aid in his examination, PVK offers the
work of Hoffman (whose research buttresses Peterson’s views to a large extent, therefore
making Dillahunty’s head hurt).As PVK
describes it in the video description:

Jordan Peterson's answer about God
reveals his knowledge of the relationship between consciousness and matter.
Materialists struggle to understand what he's talking about.

Dillahunty would be considered one of the struggling
materialists:

Materialism is a form of
philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in
nature, and that all things, including mental aspects and consciousness, are
results of material interactions….Materialism is closely related to
physicalism, the view that all that exists is ultimately physical.

Materialism can
refer either to the simple preoccupation with the material world, as opposed to
intellectual or spiritual concepts, or to the theory that physical matter is
all there is. This theory is far more than a simple focus on material
possessions. It states that everything in the universe is matter, without any
true spiritual or intellectual existence.

As best as I can understand it: all that can be known about
reality is to be found in what is physical; reason is grounded in this.Look, I have had to watch the entire PVK video
three times, and excerpts of it multiple additional times.These are difficult concepts for me to
grasp.If any of this is of interest to
you, watch the video.(As with all
commentaries based on videos, I will do my best to capture the precise words.)

So, what are my key takeaways and how are these applicable
(or not) to some of the long-running dialogue at this site?

Sunday, June 3, 2018

The argument of this book is that
the single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has been
the rise and development of the centralized territorial state.

You will get no argument from me.But why?What influences brought this on, or what other influences had to be
crushed in order that it could be brought on?These are the questions that must be explored if one is to hope to move
toward a society grounded in liberty and free from the state.

The State today has become the institution of supreme allegiance
for man and the refuge from all of life’s uncertainties.Man today considers the “State” and “society”
as synonymous, as one and the same being.Society is no longer comprised of decentralized and varied social
institutions: family, church, guild, kin, the university.Each role has been taken over by the State.

The State also cannot be regarded as the natural extension
of these decentralized social institutions; it was not by voluntary choice that
these institutions gave up authority.Instead,
the aggrandizement of the State took place in forceful opposition to these very
same institutions.

While the beginnings of the State can be found even while
these decentralized institutions held authority, what can truly be identified
as the State as we have come to know it might have best been exemplified in
Revolutionary France.In the intervening
centuries, one will find the transition.

Nisbet refers to Walter Lippmann, who offers that the State
is absolute power, and it matters not if this power is exercised by a king, a
landed aristocracy, bankers, soldiers, or a majority of voters.When the State has absolute authority to make
war, make peace, to conscript life, to establish and disestablish property, to
tax, to punish, to control education, then there is no need to differentiate between
communists, fascists and democrats.

Where there were once many social barriers in between the
power claimed by the monarch and that which the monarch could exercise, the
State knows no such distinction.Where
once the guilds, various associations, the Church and most importantly family
and kinship held sway, all was consumed by State power and authority.

If any entity has achieved emancipation through this revolutionary
transition, it is the State – emancipated from any authority above or even
parallel to it.The State – unlike the
medieval king – was above the law; the State – unlike the medieval king – made the
law.

Here We Go Again…

So much is buried in the following:

The liaison between Luther and the
German princes was more than a relation of temporary expediency.It was very nearly indispensable to the rise
of a reformed Christianity which made the individual the prime unit.

I could write 500 words on this, but I have probably already
written 50,000.So I will write a few
words without (I believe) treading on any of the same ground.I am not writing of eternal salvation here,
but of libertarian life on this earth.(You
will note in the following, clearly, some broad generalizations; from all I
have seen, I think the generalization are reasonably valid.)

It seems to me clear enough that it was in Protestant
thought that the individual stood alone in front of God; the individual was “the
prime unit.”For this reason, there are
libertarians who see in the Reformation and in the Protestant concept of man’s
relationship to God the roots of libertarianism.

On the other hand, there are libertarians who see in this
transition away from the Catholic Church the roots of tyranny and the
destruction of liberty.Libertarians
such as these see in the elimination of intermediating institutions the path
toward one supreme power – a tyrant.